name of Zuni Pueblo means the Middle Anthill of the World. Native American myths are about living as and where you are, staying or wandering, and the rhythms that pulse through all creation binding the place where you live to the story of the world and the story of time. They are about continuities between all animate beings, between the living and the dead and future generations, between the mysterious and the mundane – and between the universal and the immediate, furnishing legend with a local habitation and a name. Continuities like these, all of them, are measured in the concluding words of the poem chanted on the eighth night of the Zuni ceremony of the Coming of the Gods: when the man in whom the spirits of the earth and the dead are incarnated, after intense preparation, calls for the lifegiving aid (‘the breath’) of the ancestors (‘the fathers’) to renew the community (‘add your breath’) in the here and now. ‘Let no one despise the breath of the fathers,’ he declares. ‘But into your bodies, / Draw their breath.’ ‘That yonder to where the road of our sun father comes out,’ he continues,

Your roads may reach;

That clasping hands,

Holding one another fast,

You may finish your roads.

To this end I add your breath now.

Verily, so long as we enjoy the light of day

May we greet one another with love,

Verily, so long as we enjoy the light of day

May we wish one another well.

Verily may we pray for one another.

To this end, my fathers,

My mothers,

My children:

May you be blessed with light;

May your roads be fulfilled;

May you grow old;

May you be blessed in the chase;

To where the life-giving road of your sun father comes out

May your roads reach;

May your roads all be fulfilled.

Spanish and French Encounters with America

The Zuni were the first Pueblo encountered by the Spanish. A party led by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 had heard tales of an area far to the north where the natives told of the ‘Seven Cities of Cibula’ overflowing with wealth. So when, some years later, another explorer, the Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza (1495?– 1542), saw the Zuni village from afar, its light adobe walls glistening in the evening sun, he was convinced that he had discovered the Seven Cities, their streets paved

with gold; and he reported back to that effect to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City. ‘I continued my journey till I came in sight of Cibula,’ he wrote in 1539 in A Relation of the Reverend Fray Marcos de Niza, Touching His Discovery of the Kingdom of Ceuola or Cibula. ‘It appeared to be a very beautiful city.’ And although he decided not to enter it at this time, ‘considering my danger’ as he put it, ‘and that if I died I would not be able to give an account of that country’, he was sure that it was ‘bigger than the city of Mexico’, that there was ‘much gold in it’ and that ‘the natives of it deal in vessels and jewels for the ears and little plates with which they relieve themselves of sweat’. Furthermore, he reported, his Native American scouts had told him that ‘it was the least of the seven cities’; one other ‘much bigger and better than all the seven’ had ‘so many houses and people’ that there was ‘no end to it’. Such fabulous wealth clearly had to be in the right hands, and its present caretakers taught the twin blessings of Christianity and civilization. ‘It occurred to me to call this country the new kingdom of St Francis,’ Fray Marcos de Niza recalled; and there, outside the city, ‘with the aid of the Indians’, he ‘made a heap of stones’ with ‘on top of it’ ‘a small, slender cross’. The cross was a sign, he explained, that ‘all the seven cities’ had been taken ‘in the name of Don Antonio de Mendoza, viceroy and governor of New Spain for the Emperor, our Lord’. With one simple stroke, announcing both spiritual dominion and material appropriation, the Old World declared that it would take control of the New.

The accounts of fabulous wealth waiting to be possessed, and a native population ripe for conquest and conversion, encouraged a full-scale expedition in 1540 headed by a protégé of the viceroy of New Spain, one Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Coronado found no gold, of course, even though some members of the expedition journeyed as far as what would later be Kansas, where they encountered the Wichita tribe. One Native American scout, a Plains Indian nicknamed ‘the Turk’, lured them on with promises that they would soon find the city of their dreams. But eventually, in 1542, the Spanish explorers returned south, having garroted ‘the Turk’ as a punishment for misleading them, their only consolation being that they had subdued and stolen from the Pueblo Indians. They had not found streets paved with gold. However, as the account of the Coronado expedition written by Pedro de Casteñeda (1520?–1570?) over twenty years later (translated and published in 1904 as The Journey of Coronado 1540–1542) reveals, they had found something else: the vastness of America, the immense emptiness of the plains, over which every now and then great herds of buffalo would appear. ‘Many fellows were lost at this time,’ Pedro de Casteñeda writes, ‘who went out hunting and did not get back to the army for two or three days, wandering about the country as if they were crazy, in one direction or another, not knowing where they started from.’ If space is the central fact of American experience, as writers from Walt Whitman to Charles Olson have claimed, then this was the European discovery of it. Along with that, as in so many American stories and poems, went the discovery of the sense of being lost in America – sometimes exhilarating and at others, as here, genuinely terrifying. The Spanish could not get over the size and strangeness of everything. ‘All over the plains’ Pedro de Casteñeda reported, there

were vast numbers of bulls: ‘the number of those that were without any cows was something incredible.’ There were also ‘large numbers of animals like squirrels and a great number of their holes’: the first recorded account of the prairie dog towns common in the Southwest. Pedro de Casteñeda’s narrative of the Coronado expedition captures the abundance together with the vastness of the New World: herds of buffalo, packs of prairie dogs, great seas of ‘unripe grapes and currants and wild marjoram’, numerous streams all flowing ‘into the mighty river of the Holy Spirit which the men with Don Hernando de Soto discovered’ – in other words, the Mississippi. What is remarkable about accounts of exploration and conquest like those of Coronado or Columbus is that along with the American dream of success (the Garden of Eden, the Seven Cities) goes the discovery of bafflement. The speech of Europe has no name for either the space or the plenitude of America at this stage. To describe it requires a new language, neither entirely of the Old World or the New: which is another way of describing the evolution of American literature.

‘I found myself lost in the woods, going now on this side now on that, without being able to recognize my position.’ In this case, the European lost in America is French, Samuel de Champlain (1570?–1635), describing his explorations in The Voyages to the Great River St Lawrence, 1608–1612 (included in The Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618 [1907] ). There is, however, the same sense of negotiating a terrain that is terrifyingly unfamiliar, uncharted and unnamed. ‘I had forgotten to bring with me a small compass which would have put me on the right road, or nearly so,’ Champlain wrote. ‘I began to pray to God to give me the will and courage to sustain patiently my misfortune.’ Eventually, he finds his way back to his Native American companions; and his delight at finding them is matched only by their relief in seeing him again. ‘They begged me not to stray off from them any more,’ he explains. This is not, clearly, simple solicitude for his welfare on their part. Nor is this episode as a whole just another rehearsal of a common story: the European lost in a world only too familiar to its native inhabitants. Samuel de Champlain’s companions admit to him their fear of being accused of killing him, should he have never appeared again; their freedom, honour and even their lives would have been put in jeopardy, had he remained lost. Implicitly, they are acknowledging a dependence on him in the new order of things: their lives have been changed by the arrival of the European, so much so that they need him to be there and are fearful when he is not. The European is, in short, assuming centrality and power: something that Champlain registers in the customary way by naming his surroundings as he looks around him, just like Adam in the Garden of Eden – notably, a great expanse of water that he chooses to call Lake Champlain.

As the narrative progresses, Samuel de Champlain offers further revelations of how the encounter between Old World and New transformed both. He comes across a ‘strange fish’, his account tells us, that for now neither he nor any other European has a name for. ‘This makes war upon all others in the lakes and rivers’ and is ‘called by the savages of the country, Chaousaroo’; it will eventually be christened, although not by Champlain, ‘garpike’. ‘There are also many beavers,’ Champlain observes: a casual remark that acquires point when we remember that

he was involved in the fur trade. Samuel de Champlain may not have imagined encountering cities of gold but he had his own, more easily realizable dream of success, his own way of making America a site of profit and power. In the course of his Voyages, Champlain also reveals how he promoted the French alliance with the Hurons against the Iroquois and introduced his allies to firearms. During one Iroquois attack, he tells the reader, he loaded his musket with four balls and, as a result, killed two of the enemy and fatally wounded a third with one shot. ‘The Iroquois were greatly astonished that two men had been so quickly killed,’ he reports triumphantly, ‘although they were equipped with armour woven from cotton thread, and with wood which was proof against arrows’; and, as more shots rang out from Champlain and his companions, they hastily fled. The Iroquois had begun the attack by walking ‘at a slow pace’, ‘with a dignity and assurance which greatly amused me’, Champlain recalls. For the Native American, warfare was a ceremony, brutal but full of magic. For the European, however, it was or had become a much more practical, more straightforwardly ruthless affair. A moment like this marks the appearance of a new element in Native American life: a change that has an immediate, devastating effect on the bodies of Native Americans and other, subtler and more long-term implications for their beliefs and customary behaviour.

Samuel de Champlain professed himself amused by the strangeness of the ‘savages’ he encountered. Other early explorers and colonizers claimed simply to be shocked by their savagery and idolatry. So, the French Huguenot René Goulaine de Laudonnière (fl. 1562–82), in his A Notable Historie Containing Four Voyages Made by Certaine French Captaines unto Florida (1587), describes a bloodthirsty ritual witnessed by some of his men – at the time of establishing a colony in 1564

– with a mixture of incredulity and horror. Invited to a feast, Laudonnière tells us, the white men saw one of the Native Americans, who sat ‘alone in one of the corners of the hall’, being stabbed by some of the others. When ‘he that had been struken fell down backwards’, then the son of the chief appeared ‘apparelled in a long white skin, fel down at the feet of him that was fallen backward, weeping bitterly half a quarter of an hour’. Two others ‘clad in like apparel’ joined him and also began to ‘sigh pitifully’, after which ‘a company of young girls’ appeared and, ‘with the saddest gestures they could devyse’, carried the corpse away to an adjoining house. Asked by the visitors ‘for what occasion the Indian was so persecuted in their presence’, the chief explained ‘that this was nothing else but a kind of ceremony’ by which he and his tribe ‘would call to mind the death and persecution of . . . their ancestors executed by their enemy’. The explanation does not, however, satisfy either those who witnessed the event or Laudonnière who reports it. It remains for all of them just another example of the pointless cruelty of the local inhabitants (Laudonnière, in fact, follows this example with several others) and their consequent need to be conquered, converted and civilized.

While there might be general agreement that, if they were not to be slaughtered, then the Native Americans needed to be converted as well as subdued, there was disagreement about what conversion involved. To the king of Spain, the colony

established by René Goulaine de Laudonnière represented a violation of the true faith of Catholicism. What is more, it threatened his power and dominion in the New World, and so he ordered its elimination. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519– 74), who became captain-general under Philip II, carried out the order with ruthless efficiency, in the process founding St Augustine, the oldest permanent city of European origin in the United States. While carrying out the royal command, however, Menéndez de Avilés was also pursuing his own dream, which was to settle as large an area of the conquered territory as possible. Menéndez de Avilés overstretched himself; and, in a series of increasingly desperate letters, he wrote back to those with the resources, including Philip II himself, begging for help. The letters show how very closely the narratives, and the rhetoric, of conversion and conquest were intertwined, and how, in fact, the projects of spiritual dominion and material gain were seen as mutually dependent. The elimination of the French would ‘leave us more free to implant the Gospel in these parts’, Menéndez de Avilés explained in a letter to Philip II written in 1565. It would enable him ‘to enlighten the natives, and bring them to allegiance to Your Majesty’. ‘Forasmuch as this land is very large,’ he went on, ‘there will be much to do these fifty years’; with the proper support and supplies, though, ‘I hope in Our Lord that He will give me success in everything, that I and my descendants may give these Kingdoms to Your Majesty free and unobstructed, and that the people thereof may become Christians.’ ‘Being master of Florida,’ Menéndez de Avilés reminded his king, ‘you will secure the Indies and the navigation thereto.’ ‘I assure Your Majesty that henceforth you can sustain Florida at very little cost,’ he added, and ‘it will yield Your Majesty much money, and will be worth more to Spain than New Spain or even Peru.’ All he asked or rather prayed for at this juncture was ‘to be provided with great diligence’, since he and his fellow settlers were enduring ‘very great hunger’ and, without immediate help, many would ‘pass away from this world from starvation’.

Writing to ‘a Jesuit friend’ in 1565 in a very similar vein, Menéndez de Avilés told terrible tales of Native American idolatry. ‘The ceremonies of these people consist in great measure in adoring the sun and moon,’ he tells his correspondent, ‘and the dead deer and other animals they hold as idols.’ Many of the natives had, however, ‘begged’ him ‘to let them become Christians’; ‘and I have replied’, he said, ‘that I am expecting your worships’. ‘It has done the greatest harm,’ he warned, ‘that none of your worships, nor any other learned religious’ had ‘come to instruct these people’ since they were ‘great traitors and liars’ and desperately needed ‘the preaching of the Holy Gospel’. And to press his point home, Menéndez de Avilés even resorted to prayer. ‘May Our Lord inspire the Good Society of Jesus to send to these parts as many as six of its members,’ he implored, ‘– may they be such – for they will certainly reap the greatest reward.’ Menéndez de Avilés was clearly hoping that an investment of priests by the Society of Jesus would be the first investment in a series that would allow his settlement to prosper. To encourage this, he was not averse to suggesting that the return on such an investment would not just be a spiritual one: the Jesuits, he intimated, would reap souls if they came

over as missionaries but also a more tangible harvest. It was the same readiness to associate spiritual and material conquest that had led Fray Marcos de Niza to use the sign of the cross to announce that Spain had taken possession of the legendary Seven Cities of gold. Mastery of souls and mastery of the land shared a story and a vocabulary; they were part of one great imperial project.

That project was also the subject of and inspiration for the first American epic poem of European origin, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, published in 1610. The poem was written by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá (1555–1620), who was the official chronicler of the expedition led by Juan de Oñate that established Spanish settlements in north central New Mexico. ‘I sing of arms and the heroic man’, the poem begins, echoing the opening lines of the Aeneid, the epic poem by Virgil celebrating the founding of Rome. That captures the form, style and the fundamental aim of the Historia. The conventions of the traditional epic poem, and high rhetoric, are deployed here to celebrate the founding of a new empire, the mission of which is to civilize the wilderness and convert its native inhabitants. Addressing the ‘great King’ of Spain in these opening lines, Villagrá asks him to lend ‘attentive ear’ while the poet tells him about

the load of toil Of calumny, affliction under which

Did plant the evangel holy and the Faith of Christ That Christian Achilles whom you wished

To be employed in such heroic work.

The ‘Christian Achilles’ is, of course, Oñate; and Villagrá presents his expedition as an early religious version of Manifest Destiny. Conversion is seen, in other words, as part of the destined westward expansion of the Catholic church, moving from Jerusalem to Asia Minor to Rome and, now, to ‘nations barbarous, remote / From the bosom’ of the true faith. What may seem surprising about this poem is that it allows the ‘barbarous’ people whom Oñate has to civilize, the Acomas, an epic dignity. During the battles with the Spanish, the Acomas are presented as courageous. Prior to one battle, Zutapacan the Acoma leader – who, for the most part, is the chief villain of the poem – is even allowed a romantic episode, as he takes leave of his bride with elaborate expressions of regret and admiration for her beauty: her eyes, he declares, offer ‘peace and light’ to him, her lips conceal ‘lovely, oriental pearls’. But this, after all, is the dignity of the noble savage, whose strength and weakness derive precisely from his simplicity and simple ignorance of the true faith. To a large extent, the native inhabitants of the West are treated in this poem just as, traditionally, the peoples of the East have been by European writers: as strange, exotic and, above all, ‘other’. This is surely why the eventual levelling of the Acoma village, the killing of eight hundred Acomas and the enslavement of many more are all seen as not only inevitable but right. It is part of an imaginative venture that, like the historical enterprise it celebrates, refuses to see the Native Americans and their culture on anything like their own terms.

Where there was closer contact between the early Spanish settlers and native peoples the story could, however, get more complicated. That closer contact often meant captivity. An account of the expedition of Hernando De Soto of 1539–43, for instance, by an anonymous ‘Gentleman of Elvas’ (fl. 1537–57), The Discovery and Conquest of Terra Florida (1557; translated by Richard Hakluyt, 1611), tells how members of the party came upon a group of ‘ten or eleven Indians’. Among them, we learn, ‘was a Christian, which was naked and scorched with the sunne, and had his arms razed after the Indians, and differed nothing at all from them’. When the Spanish party approached, the account goes on, the naked Christian ‘began to crie out, Sirs, I am a Christian, slay me not, nor these Indians for they have saved my life’. The Christian turns out to be Spanish; and he explains how he was captured, prepared for death but saved by the mediation of an Indian woman, a daughter of the chief. His story anticipates one that was to become common, made most famous in the tale of Pocahontas saving John Smith. Quite probably, it reveals European misunderstanding of a Native American ritual: the visitor is being ‘saved’ in a ceremony of welcome and bonding. Certainly, it allows for acknowledgement of the humanity, the saving graces of at least some of the ‘savages’. What is more remarkable here, though, is the recognition of how the Christian may be changed by the Indian rather than change him. The Christian, so we are told, has come to differ ‘nothing at all’ from his captors; his is a story, not of conquest, but of acculturation.

That story is told at more length by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490?–1556?), who accompanied an expedition to the Gulf Coast in 1528 led by Pánfilo de Narváez. After floating on rafts from Florida to Texas, nearly all in the expedition were lost. Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, drifting somewhere off the coast of Texas or Louisiana, were captured and enslaved by Indians. However, they adapted to Indian customs over the several years of their captivity, so much so that they were trusted to move freely between tribes. Eventually, journeying through the Southwest into northern Mexico, they came across Spanish settlements and were returned to Spain. There Cabeza de Vaca wrote his memoirs, published in 1542 and later translated as Relation of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1871), which were intended both to justify him and to promote royal support for further expeditions to the New World. He could hardly claim conquest. So what he did was to write a captivity narrative, one of the first, in which the experiences of being lost in America and then living among its natives were all seen as part of one providential plan. As Cabeza de Vaca describes it, his perilous journey through the wilderness was attended by miracles. On one occasion, ‘thanks to God’, he found ‘a burning tree’ in the chill and darkness of the woods, ‘and in the warmth of it passed the cold night’. On another, he survived by making ‘four fires, in the form of a cross’. And, on still another, he prayed and ‘through the mercy of God, the wind did not blow from the north’ any more; ‘otherwise’, he says, ‘I would have died’. ‘Walking naked as I was born,’ Cabeza de Vaca recalls, stripped of all the signs of his civilization except his faith, he is captured but then proceeds to convert his captors. Like one of the early saints, he becomes both missionary and saviour,